PRESCOTT - The voices from the past were loud and clear at the Elks Opera House Tuesday.

First, there was former Mayor Frank Tutt hoping that the contents of the 50-year-old time capsule
would give the audience "a first-hand recollection of life in Prescott in 1962."

Then came former City Attorney D.J. Christensen noting that "Prescott was synonymous with progress."

And finally came former City Manager Art Bunger telling the crowd how happy he was that his son Rick
had been chosen as one of the Centennians, the group of children appointed in 1962 to open a city
time capsule on Feb. 14, 2012, Arizona's 100th birthday.

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Gadgets of the time included a General Electric transistor radio, a Norelco electric shaver,
a pink princess telephone, light bulbs, and a Porter-Cable electric drill.

Goldwater refers to Arizona as "heaven on earth" and writes, "A desert rain, just passed,
accentuated the pungency of the greasewood and I stopped my walk with the dreadful first
decision that the man of 2012 would not be able to walk from his doorstep into this pastel
paradise with its saguaro, the mesquite, the leap of a jackrabbit, the cholla or the smell of
freshly wet greasewood, because people will have transgressed on the desert for homesites
to accommodate a population of slightly over 10 million people."

He was on the right track there, but Goldwater, as would be expected, had both hits and misses.
He correctly predicted that by 2012 Phoenix would be either the fourth- or sixth-largest city in the
United States — it's the sixth — but expected a population of 3 million (it's about 1.5 million).
He also accurately envisioned Valley cities growing and merging into "a city complex not unlike
the present city of Los Angeles." On the other hand, he expected Arizona to be obtaining water
from the ocean, to have an economy based on manufacturing and to be without Indian reservations —
as Native Americans became individual property owners.

Perhaps most interesting, though, were Mr. Conservative's expectations for the relationship between Arizonans and Mexicans:

Our ties with Mexico will be much more firmly established in 2012 because sometime within the next 50 years
the Mexican border will become as the Canadian border, a free one, with the formalities and red tape of ingress
and egress cut to a minimum so that the residents of both countries can travel back and forth across the
line as if it were not there.